Archive of Our Own ^beta

Mike doesn’t know if he’s ever really been in love.

Sure, he tells El he is; and a part of him really thinks it’s true. But another part, a quiet part, a part that he shoves under his bed like used mugs he doesn’t feel like carrying down to the kitchen, says that he’s not. You can love someone without being in love with them, so where is that line drawn? What is there between his love for El and, say, his love for Will?

Well, bad example. 

He frowns at the ceiling. He’s laying on his bed, long spindly limbs sprawled out as far as they can go, watching his ceiling fan lazily tick, tick, tick in endless circles. It’s the beginning of September, but you wouldn’t know it based on the way the sun seems hell-bent on fulfilling some quota for how much misery it has to draw from the residents of Hawkins before it finally retreats beneath the horizon for a long winter’s nap. This summer has been absolutely sweltering, not helped by the thick, almost greasy Upside Down smogginess that lingers in the air like invisible clouds of spores. The government might have rolled out sheets of hammered steel to cover up the hellish rifts of orange flame that had vivisected Hawkins last spring, but they couldn’t hold back the pervasive wrongness that leaks from the half-healed scars, slowly turning the town septic. Mike’s room on the top floor has spent the last four months ballooning with hot air as it rises from the rest of the packed home, the extra three bodies doing nothing to help the heat.

Mike is (pleasantly) surprised that the Byerses are still living with his family, even almost sixteen months after they left Lenora and the world cracked into quarters. To no one’s surprise but Mike’s, real estate isn’t a booming business at the end of the world. 

Tick, tick, tick, the fan says. Why the fuck is a fan ticking? Who does it think it is? A clock? 

Mike shoots a glance at his graciously silent digital alarm clock. 2:04 A.M.

He groans into his hands. It’s his first day of junior year tomorrow, and the world had to choose tonight to slow roast him? 

The past four hours have been horrifically humid and horrendously sticky. Mike is laying in a mound of slightly soggy twisted sheets, no closer to sleep than he was when he fell into bed at a respectable ten o’clock but much closer to dehydration. How could one man sweat this much?

He sits up and huffs a sigh, slouching over his bare knees. They’re damp. Can knees even sweat?

Whatever. If he was willing to fight a nine-foot Demogorgon with a candlestick at thirteen years old, he can deal with one sweaty night of insomnia at sixteen. 

Besides, it gives him time to think about the important things. Like if his Conan the Barbarian poster is a little crooked, or if he really loves his girlfriend of four years. 

Scratch that. Give him the Demo.

“I give up!” he says to the room at large, flinging his hands up in frustration and rocking out of bed. He fiddles with his Conan poster (he thinks it’s probably more crooked than it was before, but at least he did something about it) and resolutely shoves aside the other matter. Of course he loves El. He told her as much in that pizza dough freezer, and that was what let her save the world. If his love makes someone magic, it has to be real, right?

He shuffles into the bathroom without bothering with any lights, because maybe he can trick his brain into thinking it’s colder than it actually is that way. He still feels like he’s wading through air that’s more steam than oxygen, but whatever. It’s the thought that counts.

The water under the tap is so unbelievably, blessedly cold that Mike groans. He splashes it over his face, under his arms, and then lets it run over his wrists because he thinks he read that it makes your blood colder or something, and right about now Mike would do unholy things to have coolant running through his veins. 

Who decided that hot air should rise? Didn’t they realise that humans like to sleep on the top floor?

Mike considers the water running over his pulse points. Well, no one’s forcing him to sleep on the top floor. The basement is already acting as a makeshift bedroom for two people, so why can’t it fit another?

Mike’s stomach gives a giddy little swoop of excitement at the prospect of having a sleepover in the cold basement with his best friend. Well, as close to a sleepover as you can get when you’ve been living together for a year and a half, but with a whole floor between them it should still count. After a quick change into fresh pajamas, he creeps past Joyce on her rollout bed on the landing and creaks his way down the basement stairs. 

Will looks so peaceful all snuggled up in his blanket. He and Jonathan had managed to finesse the Wheelers out of two whole standing fans to keep the air circulating down here, and Mike swears he can feel the sweat freeze on the back of his neck. It’s glorious. 

He’s too relieved to feel awkward as he snatches a blanket from the linen closet (He needs a blanket! It’s that cold down here!) and nudges Will over so he can squeeze onto the mattress beside him. 

“Mmph?” Will grunts. His head pops up like a cat woken from a sixteen hour nap, and his hair is all cowlicked because he’s always oscillated more than the fans propped in each corner while he sleeps. “Mike? What are you doing—”

“I’m actually being baked alive upstairs,” Mike groans as he settles into the mattress. It’s kind of lumpy and very much resting on nothing but floor, but right about now he would have slept in a cardboard box if it meant he would stop fucking sweating. “I don’t particularly want to cuddle up with Jonathan on the couch, and you get a whole queen-size to yourself. Scooch.”

Will dutifully rolls to the edge of the mattress, muttering something Mike can’t hear over the squeaks of the rusty springs. 

“Hey, when I say scooch I don’t mean roll all the way off.”

“It’s fine, Mike, go to sleep—”

“Hey, no get back here.” Mike loops an arm around Will’s middle and drags him back from the edge. Will’s back collides with Mike’s chest with an oomph and a little giggle. Mike’s heart is hammering, for some reason (it’s just physical comedy between friends, and they’ve always been physically affectionate, what the hell, heart?) and he hopes Will can’t feel it, that it isn’t keeping him awake. 

But Will just casts a sleepy grin over his shoulder at Mike and burrows back into his pillow. “Go to sleep, Mike.”

Mike isn’t sure if he’ll get much more sleep than he would have if he’d stayed in his room, but in any case, this is much more comfortable. 

***

“Mike!”

He presses his pillow over his ears. It’s been, what, four hours since he fell asleep?

“Mike!” A socked foot jabs into his ribs.

“Ow!” He flails undignifiedly for a moment before he untangles himself from his blanket. It’s one of those scratchy throws that’s more meant for decorating a couch than actually being used, and it’s kind of a sensory nightmare the way it’s grabbing his legs like those Upside Down hivemind vines. “Nancy, what the hell was that for?”

She widens her eyes at him, exasperated. “A wakeup call, apparently. It’s ten after.”

“Six?”

“Seven.”

Mike blearily checks the calculator watch strapped to his wrist and finds that he is, indeed, due at school in twenty minutes. “Shit.” He tries to roll out of bed, but the floor comes up under his knees too quickly and he ends up flat on his back again, splayed out across the basement carpet.

Hang on, why is he in the basement?

Last night comes back to him as he scrambles to stand. “Where’s Will?”

“He’s biking to school, because he managed to wake up on time for the first day.”

“Why didn’t he wake me up?”

Nancy rolls her eyes. “Because he’s too nice for his own good. He could barely spit it out on his way out the door that he felt bad when you went to sleep so late. He’s not your babysitter, Mike.” Suddenly, her annoyed gaze narrows into something more assessing. She’s never really been able to turn off that journalist mode, even after she gave up her spot at Emerson when the world ended and she decided to help put it back together. “I’m not even going to ask why you were sleeping in his bed,” she says in a tone that’s very much implying that he should answer anyway.

He throws his hands up in the air. “It was hot upstairs, and it’s cold down here! I couldn’t sleep! We used to have sleepovers all the time, it’s not that weird!”

Nancy’s eyebrows have crawled so high up her forehead that they’ve disappeared into her perm. “I never said it was.”

“You implied it,” Mike huffs as he clambers up the stairs to his own bedroom to change.

After a berating from his mother and father each, truncated by the fact that he was growing more and more at risk of being late with every word, Mike tosses his bike into the back of Nancy’s car as it growls to life. The passenger door is barely closed before she’s pulling out of the driveway, muttering under her breath about how she’s not your stupid babysitter and I don’t understand how Steve does it. But then the car falls into silence, and Mike falls into thought.

His mind picks up right where it left off last night, because it had gone oddly blank the second he’d opened that basement door, and it had been too frazzled so far this morning to really dial up and boot to life like the computer they have in the town library. 

Mike would have been more embarrassed about this train of thought sixteen months ago, but after the Upside Down and the Rightside Up had started bleeding together, so too had the Wheeler siblings’ familial bonds. Now, he’s almost absentminded when he casually crosses his arms and blurts out, “Hey, Nance?”

“Yeah?”

“How did you know you were in love with Jonathan?”

The car is a little jerky at the next stop sign. Mike can’t really blame her; it’s a big topic for a Monday morning, and this whole vulnerability thing is new for him, too. But he’s got a lot of thoughts in his head, and though it’s not exactly the Wheeler way to be candid like this, he doesn’t really know who else to talk to. El is an obvious no-go, and Lucas and Dustin don’t exactly have the experience he’s looking for, and Will… Will, he’s not sure about, he just knows he feels weird about having this conversation with him. But he and Nancy have literally been to Hell and back together, so why should feelings be this scary? It’s not even their feelings for each other, which is still a weird mushy line he isn’t sure if he can cross. 

“Oh.” Nancy’s voice hitches a little and comes out high pitched, caught off-guard. “Um, I don’t… know.” She tilts her head at the road ahead of her as the neighborhood opens up into a stretch of field. “How did you know you were in love with Eleven?”

He slouches down in the seat a little and taps his fingers against his biceps.

She glances over at him from the corners of her eyes, and her brow furrows. “Oh. Um.” She takes a breath and rolls back her shoulders as her eyes return to the road. “I guess I just… I felt… safe with him? Even when we were, like, soaking his house in gasoline to trap a Demogorgon or something, it just felt easier to tackle when he was there.” 

Mike nods. Yeah, he feels safer when he’s with El; she’s a literal superhero. But he also feels safer with his friends. He would never be able do any of the things he’s done if it weren’t to protect the Party behind him. “What else?”

Nancy, frankly, looks bewildered. “I guess… I didn’t just want him to be there to get me through the hard things, I wanted him there for the good things, too. It was like the lights shone brighter when he was under them. I’d hear a song on the radio and think, ‘oh, Jonathan would love this one,’ or I’d see something beautiful and just imagine him with his camera and the way he would frame the shot.” A small smile is playing at her lips, like there’s something more personal to it that’s making her glow but can’t be put into words. Usually she can make something short and snappy and headline-worthy, but she’s taking her time with these words, like she doesn’t care if they make it above the fold, just that they’re said. “It just felt like, no matter what life was throwing at me, it only really started when he was there.”

I feel like my life started that day we found you in the woods. He’d said that to Eleven in the pizza dough freezer. So he does love her. Case closed.

He nods. “So, like, you saw him and just, wham, it could be no other way?”

“What? No,” Nancy laughs, incredulous. “I barely even spoke to him until Will went missing. Did I ever…” she sighs. “Did I ever tell you about how we started talking?”

Mike shakes his head.

Nancy rolls her eyes to the ceiling like she can draw strength from the car interior. “Oh my god. But, I mean, water under the bridge, I guess.” Her fingers drum on the steering wheel. “You know that party at Steve’s house that kind of… changed everything?”

The one where Barb went missing. Mike nods.

“Well, Jonathan was out looking for Will in the woods, and he had his camera to take pictures of evidence. He ended up at the edge of Steve’s property and… this is going to sound so bad.” She grins sheepishly over at her brother.

He leans his head in, urging her to continue.

She sighs. “He… took some… weird pictures of me through Steve’s bedroom window.”

The car is silent for a solid two seconds before Mike squawks out a “What?”

“I told you it would sound bad!” Nancy laughs. “And I’m not going to defend him for it. But Steve and Carol and Tommy H. found out about it, somehow, and they cornered him in the parking lot and smashed his camera and shredded the photos.”

Mike grimaces. “Ouch. But also, like, not really.”

Nancy nods. “Yeah. I was… disgusted. But I also knew that it was kind of a shitty move on Steve’s part, so I tried to help him clean up. But it was still really not okay, so I left.” She shrugs. “And that was kind of the icebreaker between us. I felt really, really weird around him for a while because, you know, it was creepy. But as I got to know him better, I realised it was just kind of his Jonathan oddness, and while it was crossing a line, he has other qualities that sort of let me forgive and forget.” She glances over at Mike. “I don’t really think love at first sight is anything to go off of. That’s closer to how it was for me and Steve, and look how that turned out.”

Mike is silent, so Nancy goes on. “Love at first sight isn’t… real,” she tries. “Love isn’t some magical spark that just hits you like when you shuffle your socks on a carpet and zap yourself with static. It’s more like…” She’s at a loss for words for a second, searching for a metaphor. “It’s like… it’s like the first strike of lightning in a thunderstorm. Where you’ve been watching it rain for hours and a part of you knows that it’s coming, but then it strikes and it just… it hits you out of nowhere and it makes your hair stand on end and your world light up. Like you weren’t expecting it, but after it hits you look back and go ‘oh, of course. It’s been pouring rain, what did I think was going to happen?’” She grimaces. “I’m sorry, that’s such a corny metaphor. I just mean that there’s a buildup, and yeah, it hits you like a hundred million volts, but once it happens and you look back it just becomes so obvious.”

Mike is nodding along, even though he doesn’t really understand. Well, he does; some part of him is familiar with the feeling, he just can’t quite fit his relationship with El into Nancy’s template. “How obvious?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. Just… there are things you feel, in the moment, and right then you don’t think anything of it, but then in retrospect you just have to go ‘oh, so it was love.’ Like… one time I saw Jonathan talking to this girl, and even though I was still with Steve at that point, I just felt so bitter. Like she had no right to be talking to him, after everything we’d been through together. Turns out, no matter how trauma bonded you are, that’s not really platonic.”

Mike gnaws on his lower lip. “So, if that’s how it felt for Jonathan, what was the difference with Steve?”

A row of military transport trucks trundles past as they pull through the town centre and loop around the Mac-Z. Nancy sighs. “Like I said, Steve just wasn’t real. It wasn’t even lust, it was just looking for approval, it was doing what I thought I was expected to. I got more popular when I was with him, and I assumed that if it made me more accepted, it was the right thing to do. Honestly, I think Steve’s motives at that point were probably similar. But you can’t build a relationship on… on a mutual need for approval. I wanted to love him, and sometimes I thought I did, but… the lightning never struck.” She shrugs, like she didn’t just send Mike spiralling.

But then they’re pulling into the high school parking lot, and the warning bell is trilling through the cranked-down windows, so he pushes whatever thoughts he’d been forming aside. “Thanks for the ride, Nance. And, um, for the… everything else.”

She tilts her head to meet his eyes even as he unfolds out of the passenger seat. “Of course, Mike. You're my brother. Don’t forget it.” She smiles sadly. “If you ever want to tell me what this was about…”

“Okaythankyoubye!” He slams the car door, spins on his heel, and jogs into the school.

Yeah. Big topic for a Monday morning.

***

Mike doesn’t get the chance to see Will again until the end of the day. Their one shared class, chemistry, has an assigned rotating seating plan to force everyone to get to know each other (even though they’ve all been in school together since, like, kindergarten), and lunch is taken over by some mandatory pep rally-slash-military briefing. Where usually they would find ways to meet at their lockers, or linger during passing periods, or skip assemblies to go hang out under the bleachers at the far end of the field, they haven’t had time to fall into a new routine yet, so they’re clunky and clueless and separate. 

A striped yellow t-shirt catches Mike’s eye in the crowd of students rushing out of the vomitorium that is the school’s front hall. He recognises it from his own closet; since Will left most of his stuff in California and storage is limited when three extra people are squeezed into a family of five, their wardrobes have kind of blended. “Will!”

He turns, and while his grin is a little awkward, he pulls off to the side to wait for Mike to catch up all the same. “Hey.”

Mike hooks a finger through the strap of Will’s backpack and playfully jostles him as they walk. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” 

His friend flushes pink. “I don’t know, I just… I woke up at six, and I felt bad dragging you out of bed that early when you’d fallen asleep so late. You looked comfy.”

“I hope I didn’t push you off the mattress too badly,” Mike chuckles. He’s been known to starfish during sleepovers, throw bony arms and legs and elbows onto whoever is unfortunate enough to be sharing a bed with him. Then again, he had kind of fallen asleep wrapped around Will already, so. His heart does that thing again when he thinks about it, and he lets the hand drop from Will’s backpack. 

Will shrugs. “It’s not a real Byers-Wheeler sleepover unless I wake up with you half on top of me.”

That should not affect Mike as much as it does. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine,” Will says with a cute little grin. They’re nearing the bike racks now, and he turns to scan them for his ride home. “I didn’t mind.”

“Shit,” Mike says.

Will’s hands still on his bike lock. He glances back, too much worry in his eyes than is warranted, in Mike’s opinion, but the world is being pretty rude to Mike right now, so he lets it slide. “What?”

Mike’s hands fist in his hair. “I left my bike in Nancy’s trunk.”

“Oh.” A complicated series of emotions flit over Will’s face. “Yeah.”

Mike weighs the risk of calling his oldest sister to bail out his forgetful ass for the second time that day against the hour-and-a-half walk he’s faced with if he doesn’t. “Shit,” is all he says. 

The bike racks are rapidly emptying as people flee the scene of another summer holiday come and gone. Clouds bloat the sky above them, and the already humid air is buzzing with the static of a thunderstorm on the way. 

Mike does not want to get caught walking in that. 

An idea strikes him. “What if we share your bike?”

Will picks at his bottom lip. “Will we both fit?”

“Sure we will,” Mike says. “We used to all the time. I’m not sure El even has her own bike, since we always doubled up.”

“When we were twelve, Mike.” Will’s tone is tinged with an odd annoyance. He’s usually the only one that has the patience for Mike’s utter lack of object permanence. “What if you just take my bike? I’m fine with walking. The house is so crowded, it’s nice to get the time to think.”

“What? No, it’s going to pour in twenty minutes, and the bike ride is fifteen. If we head out now we can get back before it gets too bad. Worst case scenario, I walk. You’re going to get soaked and catch a cold, and I don’t think any amount of thinking time is going to be worth that.” He gently grabs Will by the elbow. “And if the house is ever feeling too crowded, just let me know, yeah? We can go read comics in my room and blast your mixtapes loud enough to drown out everyone else in the house if you want. Or, you can go hang out alone in there, and I’ll leave. Whatever. But if you need the space, you have it.” 

Will looks dumbstruck. “I… yeah. Yeah, that would be great.”

“Cool.”

“Cool.”

Mike grins sheepishly and nods at the bike. “So, should we…”

Will blinks a few times in rapid succession and straightens. “Oh. Yeah. Okay, hop on.” He swings his leg over the seat and grips the handlebars to steady the bike while Mike clambers on behind him, standing on the bar running through the back tire’s axle. Mike tentatively props his hands on Will’s shoulders. They work in tandem to kick the bike into motion, slowly rolling through the parking lot.

“See? Just like old times,” Mike says once they’re out of the lot and properly coasting down the street, homeward bound. It’s a little harder to balance than it was when they were kids, but they’re getting the hang of it.

Will huffs a breath. “What. Do you. Have in your. Backpack? Cinderblocks?” he gets out as they crest a hill. The road opens up before them, a smooth, gently sloping path cutting through the wide field that lays between their neighborhood and Hawkins proper. 

“Something like that. Let me know if you want to switch, okay?” He squeezes where his hand is resting on the junction between Will’s neck and shoulder. 

The bike wobbles, then corrects itself. 

“I got it, Mike, don’t worry. This is nice,” Will assures as the bike ratchets up speed on the downhill and he gets to rest his legs from pedalling.

“If you’re sure.”

They sail along in contented silence, until Mike feels something cold hit his cheek and notices the pavement starting to freckle with raindrops. They’re still a good five minutes away from home when it’s one person to a bike, and thus far doubling up in passengers has proven to have a similar effect on the travel time. “Shit! Will, here, switch. You’re tired, I’m not, I can get us home faster.”

Mike manages to coax Will to the side of the road through a flurry of “No, it’s okay, I’ve got it”s and hops off the bike, then unthinkingly takes Will’s hand to steady him as he dismounts, too. They swap places, but Will’s bike is a few inches too short for Mike’s lanky frame and his knees keep bonking the handlebars so, if anything, they’re going slower than before. Will’s hands on his shoulders aren’t helping, either; it’s not like he’s putting any extraordinary pressure on him, but something about the constant touch is just as destabilizing as if he was. 

Mike has an idea that will not help this last point at all, but the rain is beginning in earnest so he’d rather take his chances. “Will, hang on, this isn’t working, I’m gonna stand up to pedal. Just, like, hold on to me properly, I guess? Here.” They stop again. Mike slings his backpack across his chest and guides Will’s arms around his middle, where they chastely clasp under his ribs. Will stands back up on the bar at the back and they pick up speed again, doing a much better job of outpacing the rain. 

Warm puffs of Will’s breath keep hitting under Mike’s ear, and if it weren’t for the precious cargo clinging to him tighter than his soaked-through shirt, it would have been enough to send him careening into the roadside ditch. Will’s arms tighten imperceptibly (or, it would be if Mike was being normal about this utterly normal favour from his utterly normal best friend) as they round a bend, and Mike’s heart thrashes like a dying animal for some fucking reason. Probably because it’s working overtime trying to push a bike, backpacks that do feel full of cinderblocks, and two very much not-twelve-year-old boys through three inches of rainwater.  His stomach swoops with adrenaline (because flying off the road is very much a risk, and if he lets that happen to Will he’ll never forgive himself) when Will reaches up to swipe the sopping fringe from his eyes without Mike even needing to mention that it was bothering him. 

Finally, home emerges from the mist at the end of the street. They ride the bike right into the open garage, where Mom is waiting, hands clasped in front of her chest, looking like the dictionary image for worried sick. Her brow furrows as Mike helps Will dismount, then bends double to catch his breath and make sure he’s not, like, having a stroke, or something. “Michael, are you okay? Where’s your bike?”

“Left it with. Nancy. Forgot,” he huffs, swiping his hair back from his forehead and sending a fan of water spraying out behind him. He might as well have gone for a swim in Lover’s Lake. “In the trunk.”

“And you couldn’t have called her?”

“I didn’t have any quarters,” Mike says, which is technically true, although secondary to the fact that he didn’t want to push his luck with his sister, even after their heart-to-heart this morning. 

Mike had almost forgotten about that conversation, and feels his face growing hot. What had come over him? Sleep deprivation, probably; Wheelers aren’t exactly known for their emotional availability when fully lucid. Although Nancy had answered his questions, so. Maybe all it took to fix their dysfunctional family really was the end of the world. 

Mom seems to catch the flush rising on Mike’s cheeks, but takes it as a temperature issue, not an emotional one. “Oh, now you’re going to catch a cold. You two should get dried off.” She bustles over to the door, but holds out a hand when Mike moves to follow her. “No, you stay out here. I just mopped these floors. You two can dry off in the garage.” And she slams the door in his face.

The dull echoing drip, drip, drip as they leak all over the floor is the only sound until Mom returns with two embarrassingly childish beach towels for them and retreats back into the warm, dry house while Mike and Will shiver, sopping wet, in the garage.

Mike wraps his towel around his shoulders like a cape, checks that Will is doing the same, and moves to hit the button to send the garage door rattling shut. When he turns back to face Will properly, he lets out a chuckle. “You look like a wizard.”

Will, cloaked in a blue towel with yellow stars, jokingly holds out a hand El-style and swirls it around like he’s casting a spell. “That’s Will the Wise to you. I cast Fireball!” He flares his hand, miming launching a magical projectile, and Mike clutches his chest in mock pain. 

“Argh! Mike the Brave sustains critical damage! His chest cracks open, spilling viscera across the floor!” He falls to his knees and reaches out a hand, the other still clutching the towel to his chest. “Will the Wise, his own cleric, is distraught at the damage his closest friend has sustained by his very own hand.”

Will kneels in front of him and lays his hands across Mike’s chest, like he’s trying to hold in the guts he’s spilled. “Will the Wise thinks Mike the Brave is a nerd for using the word ‘viscera’ in conversation, but nonetheless casts Healing Word to restore just enough health points to save his paladin’s life.”

Mike lets his head drop in relief and draws their joined hands away from his chest as though checking for magical healing. “Mike the Brave thinks Will the Wise is also a nerd for using the word ‘nonetheless,’ but is eternally grateful that he will live to see another day. And then the paladin and the cleric ride off into the sunset, settle down in a faraway kingdom with three glittering waterfalls, and live out the rest of their days never again attempting to murder each other.”

Will laughs, full and bright, and Mike beams. Their hands are still loosely woven together between them, but he’s in no hurry to let go.

Will, however, clears his throat, drops his hands, and stands. He’s still smiling, though, so Mike shoves aside the odd disappointment he feels at the loss of contact and joins him on his feet.

“Just for the record,” Will says, unlooping his towel cape and scrubbing it through his hair, “I would never cast Fireball on you intentionally.”

“I know,” Mike assures, properly drying himself off, too. “You weren’t yourself. The enchanted storm we rode through together infected you with a curse that made you betray your closest friend.” He slings the used towel over his shoulder and frowns. “Well, that’s kind of presumptuous. One of your closest friends.”

Will snorts a laugh as they make their way, as dry as they can get themselves, towards the door into the house. “Come on, Mike, you know that you’re my best friend.”

Mike feels an inordinate amount of joy at the confession to a fact he already knew. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Mike bumps his elbow against Will’s as they cross the threshold. “And you know you’re mine, too.”

***

Will has a new friend, and Mike doesn’t know how to feel. 

It’s the end of October now, and things have been fine. Crawls have been upping in frequency and intensity, so El has been training harder than ever to hit Hopper’s arbitrary conditions to tag along. And out of sight, out of mind; Mike has been able to shove aside any doubts he’s had about what he feels for her, because he misses her, like any good boyfriend should, and he’s worried about what it would mean for her safety if she did end up in the Upside Down, like any good boyfriend should, so obviously he’s a good boyfriend. Case closed. 

With El training, and Dustin continuing with his angsty-Eddie-2.0 routine, and Lucas spending every waking moment at the hospital, Mike and Will have been practically inseparable. They live together, eat together, go to school together, go home together, hang out together, do homework together; Mike hasn’t found another excuse to sneak down to the basement and slip onto Will’s mattress again, but honestly, sleeping together would be the next logical progression. If Joyce hadn’t shot down his offer to have Will share his room when the Byerses moved in, they would have done that, too, and Mike wouldn’t have it any other way. 

That is, they did do all of that together, until Will started hanging out with Robin. 

“Rockin’ Robin!” he chirps brightly as he, Mike, Nancy, and Jonathan stroll into the Squawk the night of a crawl. 

“Mini Byers!” she calls back, fist-bumping him with a grin. “Big Byers. Big Wheeler. Mini Wheeler.” she greets the rest of them with considerably less verve. 

Mike’s eyebrows furrow. Who is she to talk to his best friend like that, like she’s his best friend, and he’s hers?

“One-size-fits-all Buckley,” Nancy says. Robin has that special ability to draw a joke out of her, but she’s still all business as she tucks her car keys into her jacket pocket and slides open the hidden door to the basement. Jonathan is right behind, and Steve, who had been holding down the fort in the booth when they arrived, knocks his headphones off and scrambles down behind them.

Robin rolls her eyes. “Actual chimpanzees. Come on, kiddos.” 

Mike and Will share a look, then follow. 

Down in the basement, Nancy is tapping her pointer stick against the palm of her hand impatiently where she stands in front of the projector. Lucas, Dustin, and Joyce all arrived separately, and all settled into the free seats and beanbags scattered throughout the room. Steve and Jonathan glare daggers at each other from opposite ends of the couch. 

Robin flops down between them to diffuse the tension and casually extends an arm across the back of the sofa. Will squeezes in between her and Jonathan, filling the three-seater couch a little over capacity and pressing his side against Robin’s, which does nothing to help Mike’s mood as he realises that there are no empty spots left and he plunks himself down on the floor. 

“Okay, you should all know the drill by now, but let’s go over this again. Murray’s got it on good authority that they’re making a delivery tonight to zone E8…”

It’s not that Mike tries to tune out Nancy’s droning lecture, but what’s he supposed to do when he hears Will let out a soft little giggle behind him? He casts a glance over his shoulder just in time to see Robin leaning in again, shielding her mouth with a hand, to whisper something in Will’s ear. 

Mike knows his frown can be pretty aggressive, but it’s genuinely hurting his jaw right now, and it kind of feels like his nose is crinkled so hard that it could be permed. 

“Mike!”

He snaps his head forward to meet Nancy’s trademarked Are you stupid? face; the one with the wide eyes and the gently parted mouth that’s ready to make a snappy comeback when he inevitably proves that he is. “What?”

She raps the pointer against the board. “I’m sorry, do you have better things to be doing right now than making sure your father-in-law doesn’t become Demogorgon food?”

Mike makes a face. “He’s not my father-in-law.”

“Well, he won’t be if he gets caught and ends up back in an internment camp. Which is your job to prevent, by the way, so listen up.”

Mike grumbles some excuse, but trains his eyes on the board and keeps them there. It’s not that he doesn’t like Hopper; he can be a cool guy when he’s not going all psycho protective dad mode, and it was pretty badass that he spent a year in a Russian labour camp and escaped to tell the tale, but something about the idea of him being his father-in-law makes Mike’s stomach turn. 

Probably because it is that Hopper doesn’t like him. Which, you know, fair; most of Hopper’s recent memories of Mike are from the summer of ‘85, when, yeah, Mike was kind of a little shit. But he was falling in love, okay? It’s not his fault that the way to show that is attaching yourself to the other person’s face more often than you really say a word to each other. It’s not like it was Mike’s idea of an ideal summer, either, but that’s what you’re supposed to do when your girlfriend is finally not on the run from the government, and duty called. 

He hears Robin’s voice again, and chances another look back, blood already simmering, but this time she’s saying something to Steve, and she punctuates it by grabbing his arm. She didn’t do that to Will. Who is, by the way, sitting perfectly unbothered beside her, listening to Nancy’s spiel. He meets Mike’s eyes and lifts an eyebrow, mouthing, “What’s up?”

“Not me,” he mouths back, gesturing to his seat on the carpet. 

Will scoffs a silent little laugh, and Mike grins.

“Mike!”

“Sorry!” he exclaims. Does Nancy know how to say his name in any other tone?

She glares daggers at him and seemingly speaks directly to him for the rest of the briefing.

Apparently not.

***

El and Hopper show up a little later, as soon as they have the cover of darkness on their side. They get a condensed version of the same speech, focused mainly on what Hopper has to do, since the clock is ticking down to nine o’clock and he doesn’t really need to know what’s going on in their world, just that he can trust them to do it right. El is going to stay here (much to her chagrin), so she hugs Hop goodbye before he retreats back into the tunnels.

They’d all gathered outside beneath the radio tower to meet the Hoppers when they arrived, and El grabs Mike’s hand as the group heads back inside to wait until they need to assume their own positions. He doesn’t really feel a whole lot, just the solid weight of her palm against his, but isn’t that what love is? The feeling that your partner is just an extension of yourself? She never gets any less scared for her father, no matter how many crawls he comes home from in one piece, so he squeezes her hand in return. 

Back in the station, Mike leaves El on the basement couch while he goes to grab his lookout gear from the box in the corner. He’s just pulling the camo hoodie free when he feels a hand on his shoulder.

It’s Nancy, her face caught somewhere between ire, disappointment, and concern. “I don’t think you should go out on the crawl tonight.”

“What?” Mike cries indignantly. “But I’m always the lookout with Lucas. We’ve never failed.”

“And I want to keep it that way,” Nancy murmurs. “You’ve been distracted today, and that’s the last thing we need from the person in charge of noticing everything.” She squeezes the hand that’s still on his shoulder and frowns. “What’s going on, Mike? Is it the same thing that was bothering you last month?”

It should probably say something about their relationship that Mike has confided in his sister literally once in the past two months, but whatever. He makes a face, something between exasperated and sneering. “What? No. I didn’t sleep well last night. Same as the first day of school. That’s all. I’m fine.” As he says it, he realises that that’s probably what’s wrong with him right now. He has been having a hard time sleeping, recently, between weird dreams and headaches and nosebleeds that initially freaked him out until he realised that it’s just because the air is cold and dry and the sun is disappearing and he’s already never really been good about getting enough vitamin D. 

“Mike, you literally just admitted to the fact that you’re out of commission today.”

“No I didn’t! I just said I didn’t sleep enough, but is anyone these days?”

“Probably not, but I’d rather bet on someone who isn’t so obvious about it.” She frowns. “I’m sending Jonathan out instead. He’s got a photographer’s eyes, he’ll catch the details.” 

“Hey! That’s not fair, I’ve got… I’ve got…” he casts around for some excuse better than I don’t want to be around my girlfriend but comes up blank.

“Sleep deprivation?” Nancy smirks. “Nice try. But I think I’ll take the cameraman.”

Mike should say something indignantly to Nancy’s retreating back, but he just stands there with his arms hanging dumbly by his sides and his eyes darting helplessing across the floor as his mind latches onto something else.

Since when does he not want to be around El? 

Well, consciously, at least. Looking back on the past few months, he realises that maybe this shouldn’t be as surprising as it is. Has he not been almost relieved every time she shows up late to a crawl planning session, every time he passes her Wanted poster in the hallway instead of her actual self, every time she puts training above him? If he loves her, why is he so desperate to get away? 

Mike is forcibly taken back to October 1985, Will’s bedroom, when El said she loved him and kissed him senseless and he stood dumbstruck in front of Will’s empty closet the way he’s standing now. Dumbstruck, not lovestruck, because he’d realised, then, that he was in no way shape or form ready to say it back. He was falling in love, and he loves her now, that much he knows (he knows), but he’d felt this sinking feeling in his stomach when he realised she was head over heels and his feet were still firmly stuck to the ground. Then, too, he had been almost looking forward to her imminent departure, so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences of his own feelings, or lack thereof.

But if he didn’t love her then, and says he loves her now, why does he feel the same way?

It’s the doubt. It’s the doubt. It’s the fact that he’s questioning how he feels about her, so his brain is drudging up memories from when he didn’t love her yet so he can see the reasons he does love her now (even if he feels the same, but he’s never been great at pattern recognition). 

He zones back into reality. Will and El are talking quietly on the couch, and Mike doesn’t feel quite ready to talk to either of them, so he heads upstairs with the others to see them off. 

A twinge of annoyance accompanies Lucas’s and Jonathan’s departures. Jonathan is wearing Mike’s gear, which decidedly does not fit him, and Mike kind of hopes he rips something from the strain so that he can be properly annoyed at him. He turns his attention to the Scoops Troop, a nickname that’s managed to outlast Scoops Ahoy itself, where they’re preparing the WSQK van.

Dustin finishes fiddling with the glorified ham radio sprouting out of the roof and calls out, “Steve! Get your ass in here and drive!” His and Steve’s relationship, once oddly close, has rotted into something necrotic that refuses to let go in the time since Eddie died. They can all see it; the way Dustin’s growing out his hair and changing his wardrobe to pick up Eddie’s torch, and burning down his bond with Steve in the process. 

“Coming! Jeez, kids these days,” he mutters to Robin, who rolls her eyes and pulls him into a crushing hug.

“Imagine what I’ll be stuck with if you don’t come back in one piece,” she jokes. “I promise you I am a terrible babysitter. One time, when I was fourteen, the kid I was watching managed to get his hands on his mom’s hairspray and his dad’s lighter, and he cornered me in the living room with them and he—”

“Robin,” Steve mutters, pulling back.

“Sorry,” she sighs. “Just don’t die out there. It would be pretty embarrassing to survive an evil Russian doctor and an evil-er tentacle lord just to get taken out by some guy with a gun.”

“Never underestimate a guy with a gun. Or a girl with a gun.” He nods to Nancy, who’s gripping her emotional support rifle even though she’s not leaving the station. “Or Steve Harrington.”

She chuckles. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” She lets him go and socks him lightly in the shoulder. “Love ya, dingus.”

“Love you too, Robs.” 

Mike’s heart jumps to his throat. Love you? Maybe he doesn’t need to worry quite so much about Robin’s relationship with Will if she’s already with Steve. 

Mike briefly considers examining why, exactly, Robin’s status as single or taken should impact the way he feels about her hanging out with Will, but decides that some feelings are better left unexplained.

He sidles up beside her as the van and the bikes peel away from the station. “Does the way Steve looks at Nancy bother you?”

Robin’s eyes dart to Mike’s like she didn’t fully realise he was there. “Why would it?”

Mike tilts his head. “I mean, I’d be pretty pissed if my boyfriend started following around some other girl like a lost puppy.” (My boyfriend. He’s saying it from Robin’s point of view, but he still feels an odd surge of something in his chest as he says it.)

She lets out a short bark of laughter. “My what now?”

“Your… boyfriend?”

Robin shakes her head and looks up at the stars for strength. “Steve and I are not dating. I thought everyone knew that, based on the fact that he’s been going on a date a week with  different girls for the past, like, two years?”

Mike, who’s been too grossed out to really give Steve’s life much thought since he started dating Nancy in sophomore year, did not know either of these facts. “Oh.” He considers the middle distance in front of him for a second. “Then why did you say that you love him?”

She tilts her head at him. “Because I do? You can love someone without being in love with them, strange child.”

That’s exactly what Mike had thought to himself that night two months ago when he’d spiralled until he climbed into bed with Will, who’s always had the unfailing ability to put him at ease, which should maybe be a prime example. Mike barely knows Robin, but sleep deprivation has already proven to be a truth serum for him, because she’s having a similar effect right now. He finds himself asking, “What’s the difference?”

Robin is silent until Mike turns to look at her. She’s staring at him, head cocked, mouth hinged open. “What?”

Mike feels himself flush and looks away, crossing his arms protectively over his chest. “Nevermind.”

“No, no, I do mind,” Robin says quickly. She pulls her bottom lip into her mouth and traces her eyes over the beams of the radio tower above them, thinking. “I don’t know. Steve is, like, an idiot? But he’s my idiot. But not my idiot, obviously, because I’d never date him, because I’m—he’s not really my type.” Her response is more of a ramble than Nancy’s careful answer, but Mike kind of likes it. It’s chaotic, which is exactly the way emotions work, and he’s finding it easier to follow along when he’s already going the same speed. “I don’t know, I love him. I’d die for him. But I’d die for a lot of other people, too, because you don’t have to want to chew on someone’s face to care about them. Sometimes you just want the best for people, or you like talking to them, or you connect with them on a soul-deep level without feeling the need to consummate it.” She looks back down at Mike and smiles, that same little private grin that had seized Nancy’s mouth in the car when he’d asked her the same question. “But sometimes, there’ll be this one person that you do. You have that connection, you have that friendship love, but there’s something else about the bond you have with them that you don’t feel like you can have with anyone else, at least not at once. You want to be their one and only, their first choice, because they’re yours. But not like Steve is my idiot, because he was Dustin’s idiot, too, and that brought me just as much joy. They’re yours like… like your toothbrush is yours. No, scratch that, that’s kind of toxic. They’re yours like… like the Tonka truck you probably had in kindergarten. They’re yours, and you make sure everyone knows it, even if you have to learn to share.”

Mike blinks. Robin delivered her entire monologue about as fast as she delivers her radio broadcasts, which is to say, fast. He’s still processing.

He would die for a lot of people. El, of course, but also Dustin and Lucas and Nancy and Holly and Will. He almost did die for Will; he followed through with throwing himself off that quarry after they found his “body,” and wouldn’t be standing here questioning his love for El if she hadn’t shown up and saved him.

She’s his superhero. Of course he loves her. How could he not? 

But the question isn’t if he loves her, it’s if he’s in love with her, which are, clearly, not the same thing. 

He hasn’t seen El in a week. She’s been too busy training and hiding from the Wolf Pack to make time for her high school boyfriend. 

And Mike… doesn’t really care. He’s been telling himself that she’s finding her passion and any good boyfriend would support her in that. But he hasn’t been supporting, he’s been stepping aside to clear the way for her to do it on her own. Where previously he’d been all up in her face, holding her hand through every step of every journey, no matter how small, he’d been slowly but surely pulling away until they were barely even together at all. 

And you know what? It’s bringing him joy, the way Robin explained sharing Steve with Dustin did for her. He almost prefers watching El grow apart from him to twining their branches together like they had been from the time she came back from Chicago until she left for California. 

From the time she left for California. Right after the scene in Will’s bedroom, where she was filled with giddiness and Mike was filled with dread. 

Because he couldn’t say it back.

Because friends don’t lie, and because it wasn’t true.

Mike loves Eleven. That much he’s known since he found her in the woods and she started pointing them towards Will. She’s his superhero.

But not his superhero. 

“Um,” Mike says intelligently. “I—yeah, that makes sense. Sorry for assuming.”

“Not a problem at all. We get it all the time.” Robin’s staring at him a little too intently. She has this filterless genuineness to her, evident in the way she just busted out the truth of love to some “strange child” on a whim, but it has a way of cutting through your own defenses that Mike isn’t sure he can handle right now. 

So he gives her an awkward grin, turns on his heel, and hides in the station’s supply closet until he gets his emotions back under control.

***

The fact that he manages to return to the Squawk’s basement twenty minutes later and sit beside El on the couch like nothing is wrong should qualify Mike for some kind of award. Screw Paul Newman and The Colour of Money, that Oscar should have gone to Mike Wheeler for I Just Realized I’m Probably Not in Love With My Girlfriend but I Can’t Say Anything Until I’m Sure. 

He doesn’t want to base his entire verdict on one unshackled-teenage-girl-he-barely-knows’ opinion, but the fact that he asked in the first place should probably speak for itself. He needs to talk to someone he trusts; maybe he could ask Nancy again? He really can’t think of anyone else he’s close enough with that would have enough experience to string together a coherent answer, but Nancy’s already suspicious enough as it is. 

What about Steve? Robin said he’s a chick magnet, he probably knows a thing or two about love. But, to be fair, the last long-term monogamous relationship Mike’s aware of Steve being in was with Nancy, and he’d really rather not have to hear about what a teenage boy thinks about his older sister. 

He can’t really think of any adults in healthy marriages in his life. His parents are slowly but surely spiralling towards divorce, he thinks (Dad can barely open his mouth at dinner without Mom snapping at him—which is for the best, in Mike’s opinion—and there are always a few too many wine bottles in the recycling bin on garbage day). Joyce still has Lonnie’s last name, but she’s with Hopper now, and they’re still going strong. She literally executed a jailbreak from a Russian gulag for him, which seems like pretty in love behaviour. Plus, she’s a grownup—aren’t adult relationships supposed to be more, like, stable and rational and long-term than teenage flings? She’s probably his best bet. 

Mind made up, Mike lets himself settle back against the couch cushions. He glances over at El, who’s bent over her knees and spinning the blue bracelet on her wrist as she hangs on every word broadcasted through the radio.

Joyce loves Hopper, but Hopper loves El, and Hopper decidedly does not love Mike. What if Joyce puts a little too much together and lets something slip to Hop? He would flay Mike alive like… one of the flayed, he guesses; a pile of meaty goo, full of rats and bone shards. And Mike would really love to live to see the first three episodes of Star Wars, so that doesn’t sound great. 

But who else is there? Someone he trusts, someone who’s been in love, someone who won’t tell a soul…

His decision is made for him when Will puts a hand on his arm. “Want to go for a walk with me?” he asks with a nod to Joyce and El. “It’s kind of… tense down here, and I could use some air.”

Mike is already nodding. Of course he should ask Will; he’s his best friend, and while he ruled him out two months ago, now there’s a very real chance he’s with Robin, which might give him enough insight to help Mike figure out what’s going on with El.

Mike frowns as he stands, zones out while Will convinces his mother to let him out of her sight for ten minutes, and only comes back down to Earth when Will grabs him by the sleeve to drag him up the stairs. Will very much might be with Robin. Mike guesses he should be happy for his best friend, but he can’t find it in him to be anything but bitter. Will’s always been the slowest of the Party to grow up, so why is he choosing now, when the apocalypse is looming and Mike’s relationship is falling apart?

Besides, no matter how trauma bonded and jaded they all are, Robin is a little old for him. 

Speak of the devil, she’s in the recording booth right now, bound by the fact that WSQK is supposed to be up and running until midnight on Saturdays. She raises an eyebrow at them as they make their way towards the front door. Will points to himself, then Mike, then mimes walking with his hand and holds up ten fingers. She nods, and continues her broadcast. 

Mike grits his teeth. Why does Will feel the need to explain where they’re going to her? She isn’t his… his keeper. Although, to be fair, Mike was, like, mega overprotective of El when he was sure of his feelings (or, thought he was). Will is in love, and can he fault him for that?

No, he can't, he decides, because as soon as the door shuts behind them Will sticks his arms out and his head back and does an adorable little spin as he huffs in the crisp night air and Mike decides that any decision Will makes is the right one. 

“So,” Mike starts once Will is back by his side. They start looping around the building. “You’ve been, uh. You’ve been hanging out with Robin a lot recently.”

“Have I?” Will asks, unconcerned. “I don’t know, she’s fun to be around. And it’s not every day you get to be friends with a celebrity.” He bumps his shoulder against Mike’s and smirks. 

Mike snorts tightly through his nose. “I guess.” 

He could ask, outright. But it also feels kind of weirdly forward to just ask if he’s dating her when he hasn’t outright offered the answer. So instead, Mike asks, “Hey, Will? Have you ever been in love?”

Because that’s less weirdly forward, obviously.

Usually, they’ll let the conversation jump between topics with no segue and take it in stride, blurt out random observations without filtering them first, skip the smalltalk and just cut right to the chase, because after twelve years they’re kind of beyond nice weather we’re having. But this one seems to catch Will off-guard; his foot catches on something on the ground, and he cuts Mike a quick glance out of the side of his eye before resolutely fixing his eyes forward. “Uh.”

Not a no.

Mike keeps watching him, and eventually Will spits out an “Um, I don’t know, maybe?”

“‘Maybe?’” Mike probes. “Why aren’t you sure?”

Will looks vaguely panicked. “I don’t know, Mike. I guess… the person I maybe love definitely doesn’t love me back, so the point is kind of moot.”

“Who is it?” So much for not being forward.

Will wets his lips and his eyes dart over to Mike’s. “I— It doesn’t matter. It’s… I don’t feel that way anymore.” He looks vaguely pained as he says it. “No one you’d know.”

I don’t feel that way anymore Mike’s ass, he heard Will use present tense two seconds ago. “Hawkins is tiny, I probably would.”

Will shakes his head. “It was at its worst in California. I’ve had over a year to get over it, so it doesn’t matter.”

He’s being weirdly evasive, and Mike can tell he’s lying. 

Oh my god. Will is in love with Robin. Mike doesn’t know if they’re dating or unlabeled or Will is just pining from afar, but he does, one-hundred-percent, feel something for her at this very moment. Mike feels himself flushing red. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry, Mike, it’s just…” He sighs. “It’s complicated.”

“Uh huh.” Mike kicks a pebble out of the way. “In what way is it ‘complicated?’”

Will crosses his arms and keeps his eyes trained on the heavens. “I’m— It would have… repercussions, if anything happened.”

“‘Repercussions?’” Mike clarifies. That seems a little dramatic for a high school relationship. “What, is it some Romeo and Juliet situation? ‘From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, / Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean?’ Have a lot of enemies in Lenora?”

Will hides his face in his hands. “No. Kind of… no. I don’t know, Mike, I don’t want to talk about it. Just know it wouldn’t work, so it doesn’t matter. I’m happy with the way things ended up.”

Mike hmms noncommittally. It’s probably because Robin’s older, or that she’s so intrinsic to this whole operation that if she and Will dated and broke up this whole mission could be compromised. Kind of like how if Mike and El break up, things could go awry…

“I’m sorry, Mike,” Will is saying. “I wish I could… I’ll tell you when it isn’t so… fresh, maybe.”

“Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s okay.” It’s not okay. They’re supposed to tell each other everything. They do tell each other everything; they literally live on top of each other, and Mike is wearing Will’s shirt right now, so they’ve kind of leaned into the fact that they’re merging. Except, apparently, for important matters like this. They can share comic books, but not who they love. 

Well, maybe some of that is on Mike. That same summer when everything started to fall apart with El, Mike had said a thing he’ll always regret.

“It’s not my fault you don’t like girls!”

Mike is not homophobic; his father is, and it’s always made him inordinately uncomfortable, and he’s always been weirdly appreciative of people like Harvey Milk and David Bowie for their courage in the face of a prejudiced society. (He’d even been briefly inspired by Bowie’s orange mohawk, until Nancy talked him out of it and he realised that that might be a little too appreciative.) In short, it’s not like him to make an insinuation that someone’s gay, especially in a derogatory light. He and Will had been called fairies and queers enough times when they used to hold hands until the second grade that he never would. He’d been projecting his own insecurities about his relationship with El onto Will; Mike himself wasn’t as into his girlfriend as he should have been, so Will not caring about dating at the ripe old age of fourteen felt like a weakness he could exploit. 

So maybe that’s why Will won’t talk to him when he finally does like a girl, because Mike has already proven himself to be an asshole where the status of Will’s love life is involved.

Whatever. Mike knows he can be an asshole, and he really knows that he was an absolute piece of shit that summer because of his relationship with El, so now that he thinks that relationship is on its way out, what better time to make amends?

“It’s okay,” Mike repeats, and this time he feels like it really might be. “You don’t have to tell me, if you’re not ready.” 

Will seems to sense the genuineness this time around, and he finally looks back over, a gentle smile on his mouth. “Thanks.”

“Of course,” Mike says. And because he wants to prove that he’s cool now, that he didn’t mean to be as judgemental as he sounded two years ago, and that he really isn’t (shouldn’t be) annoyed about Will setting boundaries, he reaches out and takes Will’s hand lightly in his. The way they did back in second grade, the way that got them called queers, because he isn’t homophobic, which he really wants Will to know. Will is his best friend, and they can be whatever they want to be, free of judgement, so Will can tell him anything, and he’ll love him anyway. Which gives him an idea, actually; you can love someone without being in love with them, so he decides to try that out. “No matter what, you know I love you.”

Will’s hand stiffens in his. “What?”

Shit. What if Mike was worrying about the wrong thing, and Will is homophobic? Mike was just trying to demonstrate how deep their friendship goes, but maybe he sounded a little… yeah. He doesn’t want to think about that, so he squeezes their joined hands and clarifies, “You’re my best friend. We’ve fought literal monsters together. Kind of hard not to love you after that.”

“Oh,” Will says, and Mike wonders if he’s stepped too far, but then he squeezes back. “Yeah. Yeah, I… I feel the same way, Mike.”

He doesn’t say it back, but Mike tries not to read too far into it as he drops his hand back to his side and changes the subject. 

***

Will and Robin are definitely dating, and Mike is definitely reading too far into it. Nancy drove him and the Byerses home after another successful unsuccessful crawl (in the sense that Hopper made it out scot-free, but Vecna is still MIA), and he’s steadily pacing a ditch down the centre of his bedroom. Will probably would have told him about something as silly as a crush, so he’s probably hiding some secret not-so-secret relationship with Robin from everyone, including Mike, because people would tell him how stupid it is to jeopardise how well the team works together by dating within the group.

Mike doesn’t know why he cares so much. He wants Will to be happy, and Will is happy, so why isn’t Mike happy? Why does the image of Will and Robin breaking up send a swoop of something warm and vindictive surging through his chest? And why does the image of them together fill his mouth with the bitter taste of Buckley’s? Robin’s really living up to her family name. 

Tick, tick, tick his ceiling fan adds helpfully. Nancy, Jonathan, and Will all fell into bed as soon as they were through the door, and Holly and his parents are long asleep, so Mike is as alone as he can get while living in a glorified relief camp. 

If Mike didn’t know better, he’d think it tasted like jealousy. But why would he be jealous of Will and Robin dating? Not that he knows they’re dating or anything, just… he doesn’t know. He barely knows Robin, is all, and Will is still his best friend.

Is that it? He doesn’t want to lose him? He wants Will to only be happy when Mike is the one making him so? That’s such shitty friend behaviour. 

No, what if it’s not who’s in the relationship, just the relationship itself? Will and Robin are happy, Mike can tell as much, based on the way Will can’t get out a word without a giggle or make a face without a grin when they’re together. There’s an ease between them in the way Robin grabs Will’s sleeve to drag him along to whatever mission she’s cooked up in her loose-screwed head. Mike probably wishes he had that stability, that certainty, in his relationship. He’s jealous of the way they can exist together and be utterly at ease, not ratcheted up with stress the way Mike has been around El for the past few months. His passive anxiety about what kind of love it is gets cranked up to eleven when he’s confronted with her, and he spends more time mentally checking how he feels about his actions than relishing in the actions themselves. 

That’s so fucking pathetic, Mike. You’re so insecure about your own relationship that you can’t handle your best friend being happy? El deserves better than him.

Will deserves better than Robin. 

Robin, who’s kind of kooky and kind of mean, not intentionally so but just in a filterless way that can almost hurt more.

Well, Mike can be kind of mean, too, he supposes. He’s sharp-edged and quick to lash out, unable to pull his punches when he’s geared up to swing. Verbally, of course; physically, that candlestick back in the Byers’ house three years ago is probably as ambitious as he should be getting.

Wait, why is he comparing himself to Robin?

To be fair, though, he can see some similarities between them. Besides the raw abrasiveness, there’s a level of genuineness they share, too. Especially with Will, Mike feels like he can shut down his defenses and just let himself be soft, which is probably his version of Robin’s long rambles that tumble out without end once she gets comfortable with someone and drops the snarky mask. They both approach the world with this sense of confidence that’s so awkwardly shaky it almost reaches a resonance frequency and stabilises into something to really take seriously; Mike can’t seem to make it to anything on time, but planning crawls is a-okay, and while a simple conversation can be enough to take Robin out she’s somehow the only shock jock that can run the Squawk. Hell, even their haircuts were kind of similar until Mike decided his was getting too effeminate and he sheared it all off. 

So really, he and Robin have a lot in common. What does Will see in Robin that he doesn’t see in Mike? What made him pick her, when he could have picked—

Mike stops dead. Without his shuffling, pacing footsteps, there’s nothing to fill the air but his own small gasp and the tick, tick, tick of his ceiling fan.

Oh.

Oh.

He pivots slowly to meet his own eyes in the mirror mounted on the inside of his closet door. His eyes skim over his dark curls, his sharp cheekbones, the scattering of freckles laid out like constellations across his nose that he could map just as surely as the night sky. All familiar features, all the Mike he’s known for sixteen years. All the little Mike that walked up to Will in kindergarten and asked to be his friend. All the medium Mike that fought monsters to get his best friend back. All the big Mike that lost his spark when he made his entire existence about the superhero he thought he should love because he was a boy and she was a girl and he knew he felt something about her, so what else would it be? 

Except for the one new fact that’s blowing his brown eyes wide and making his mouth part around a silent protest for the universe. All familiar, except for the thing that changes everything.

Mike has been in love. Is in love, in fact.

With Will.

Mike is in love with Will.

***

Mike is in love with Will. 

You can love someone without being in love with them, yeah, but sometimes you really are just in love with them. Sometimes that special bond you have with your childhood friend is more than just a close friendship. Sometimes when your heart hurts when your friend hangs out with other people it’s not just platonic protectiveness. Sometimes when you can’t tear your eyes away from your friends mouth it’s not just to better hear what they’re saying. 

Mike is laid out on his bed, staring at the ceiling, limbs flung out as far as they can go. Only this time, he’s not trying to increase his surface area to let as much heat out as possible; this time, he’s trying to air out this thing that’s wrong with him, or maybe offer himself up to God as a way of asking Him to try again.

Mike’s not homophobic, until it’s toward himself.

Suddenly, queer feels like an insult. He’d never use it against someone else, and he still doesn’t think less of Bowie or Boy George or Elton John or anyone who is, but somehow Mike himself is an utter smear on the world for being that way, too. 

Poor Will, he thinks. Poor Will, for unwittingly attracting someone as disgusting as Mike. Poor Will, for just trying to move on from his childhood trauma and finally get a girlfriend and ending up with a best friend who wants him, too. Mike is almost glad that Will has Lucas and Dustin to fall back on.

He almost jumps out of his skin when someone hammers on his door. “Mike?”

“Coming!” he hollers back, hopping off his bed and doing his best to smooth the self-loathing from his face. He opens his bedroom door to find Nancy, arms crossed and foot tapping impatiently like she’d been waiting for a lot longer than fifteen seconds. “What?”

“I’m going on a supply run to Big Buy, and Mom wants you to come. You haven’t left your room all day, and you look a little stir-crazy.”

Mike runs a hand self-consciously through his hair, but since his frenzied pulling of it is probably what messed it up in the first place, he doesn’t imagine it does much. 

He glances at his alarm clock, and is shocked to see that it’s nearly four in the afternoon. He’s almost glad that he had this realization on a Saturday night, because if today hadn’t been a lazy Sunday, he’s sure that he would have been a hazard to be around. 

He hesitates for a moment, then says, “I’m not really—”

“You don’t understand,” Nancy interrupts. “Mom wants you to go, and I think Dad pissed her off again, because it’s wine o’clock somewhere.”

Mike clenches his jaw. He’s really not in the mood to be interrogated by Nancy Drew, but he’s also not really in the mood for pissing Mom off when he just realized that he’s kind of a failure of a son. “Fine.”

Which is how he finds himself, less than twenty-four hours after the most devastating realization of his life, slumped in Nancy’s passenger seat while the voice of the girl who just became his worst enemy drawls out of the radio. 

“Gooooood afternoon, Hawkins! This is Rockin’ Robin, here to lend my sultry tones to—”

Mike twists the dial to another station, any other station, because he really can’t hear those sultry tones right now.

“Hey!” Nancy squawks. She twists the dial back.

“—out for dinner tonight, so you, my little Squawkers, will be put in the hands of King Steve, which are mighty fine hands for matters of babysitting indeed.”

“Driver gets radio privileges, Mike! And besides that, it’s not like we’re in the middle of an apocalypse, or anything, and it’s not like this station is our primary method of communication.” Nancy’s eyes don’t leave the road, so she can’t see Mike glaring holes through the side of her head.

“Who am I going out to dinner with tonight, you ask? Well, funnily enough, it’s [train clattering and whistle blowing]. Match made in heaven, aren’t we? Anyway, enough about little old me, you’re not here for the Rockin’ Robin Show, you’re here for WSQK, the Squawk! [rubber chicken squawks]”

Mike actually has to clench the armrest to stop himself from jumping out the window when the opening notes of Can’t Fight This Feeling tumble out of the radio. “Nothing important is happening, and this song came out, like, three years ago,” Mike snaps as he switches to a different station. It’s a Sin by The Pet Shop Boys replaces it, which is worse by several degrees of magnitude, but Mike’s already being obvious, and he feels like switching it again would be pushing it too far.

Nancy, however, wasn’t an Emerson journalism early decision for nothing. (Well, that’s kind of irrelevant right now, since Mike realistically knows that anyone with eyes can see his crisis. He’s only good at repressing his feelings when he doesn’t know they’re there.) “Mike, what the hell is wrong with you today?”

He slumps further down in his seat and doesn’t respond. 

Nancy scoffs. “Fine, sulk. Not like you’re sixteen, or anything.”

His foot continues to tap out an anxious rhythm against the floor mat. 

She cuts him a glance out of the corner of her eye, her annoyed frown softening a little with what a more optimistic person than Mike would call concern. “Is it… the same thing that was bothering you last night?”

Mike straightens a little. “What are you talking about?” he asks hotly, defensively, obviously so.

She fully looks over at him this time and raises an eyebrow. “You think it’s not wildly distracting to have a passenger huffing every breath when you’re trying to drive home, dead middle of the night, after executing a heist in another dimension?”

“I wasn’t huffing every breath,” Mike huffs. “I was—” he searches for some other verb, but comes up blank. 

“Uh huh,” she says, turning back to the road. 

“Okay, well, forgive me for caring about my friends.” He raises his arms defensively. When she looks back at him, confused, he continues, “I mean, Will and Robin are obviously dating, and he wouldn’t tell me about it, and I’m—I’m—I’m pissed.”

At “dating,” she lets out a shocked bark of laughter. “Will and—Mike, have you not known him since kindergarten? He obviously wouldn’t date Robin. Robin, I mean—” she laughs incredulously. “Have you ever, like, spoken to her? She’s—” Nancy cuts herself off and shakes her head. “She’d date a Demo before Will.”

“Hey, that’s still my best friend that you’re talking about,” he snaps. “And how would you know? She just said she’s going on a date tonight, and the only two guys she spends, like, a lot of time with are Steve and Will, and she already said she’s not dating Steve—”

“See, that one I could see,” she interrupts. “I thought she was dating Steve when I first met her. But Will? Mike, I have never met two more incompatible people.”

“Why?” Mike means to sound contrarian, but even he can hear the hopeful note in his voice. 

“They’re both—” Nancy stops, furrows her brow, and snaps her head to look at him. After a pause, she asks cautiously,“Do you like Robin?” not really sounding like she believes it herself but also like she needs to get it out of the way.

“What? No,” he responds with genuine disgust, but his heart starts making a valiant effort to tear a Gate open through the center of his chest. Do you like Will? He can hear the question on the tip of her tongue. She’d asked him a similar question about Eleven, years ago, when this whole thing was starting and he’d accused her of liking Jonathan. He remembers just how defensive he’d sounded, and knows that she’ll see through him just as clearly now as she had then if she voices the question and he’s forced to respond. 

She doesn’t. She snaps her mouth shut, but her eyes linger on her brother’s face for an irresponsibly long time as a look of nerve-wracking understanding crosses her face and she tentatively looks back towards the road, gnawing on her lower lip. 

Shit. Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit. Mike knew he shouldn’t have gotten in the car with Nancy fucking Drew. He’s never been able to hide a secret from her (unless he didn’t even know he was harbouring it, apparently), so why would he even look her in the eye before he could, he doesn’t know, douse himself in holy water? It had taken her a grand total of twenty seconds to clock him when he’d had his first beer (one single bottle at a party), and even less when he and Will had snuck a joint from Jonathan’s stash and smoked it in the woods behind their house (even after they’d changed their clothes and brushed their teeth and had thrown themselves at helping Mom cut onions for dinner to explain the red eyes), so why should this secret be any different? 

Mike remembers, suddenly, the how did you know you were in love? conversation from two months ago. Why did he have to go to Nancy for that? He might as well have just come right out and said “Hey, Nance, I don’t think I love my superhero girlfriend anymore because I’m a dirty queer who can’t be trusted with a best friend for the risk of falling in love with him.” 

While he spirals, Nancy’s more cool and collected than ever. She’s not angry, she’s not disgusted, she’s not accusatory. Instead, she’s as open and unguarded as Mike has ever seen her. As they pull into the Bradley’s Big Buy parking lot and the car falls silent (save for the frankly obnoxiously violent hammering of Mike's heart), she finally turns back to him.

“Will and Robin are not dating,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m obviously not… close with Will the way you are, but I have gotten pretty close with Robin, and I can tell you that she is, without a doubt, not interested, and I don’t think Will is, either.” She reaches out a hand and lays it on Mike’s arm. He flinches. “I think you should talk to him, if it’s bothering you, because that boy loves you more than life itself, Mike, and if he knew how much this was hurting you, he would do everything in his power to stop it.”

Mike screws his eyes shut. He can’t look at his sister. She knows. She knows. He couldn’t even make it a full twenty-four hours without someone smelling it on him.

Her hand rubs gently up his arm, and he hears her inhale. “I love you,” she says, stilted and awkward. 

It’s so un-Wheeler-like that he knows she’s lying. 

But she carries on. “I know I don’t really say it to, well, anyone. I know it’s not really what we do,” she murmurs, like she’d read his mind. “But I do, Mike. You don’t… I don’t think you have to say something for someone to know you mean it”—Mike clenches his eyes tighter—“but I want to say it now. I love you. Even when you’re a little shit, you’re still my little brother. You can always talk to me, and I’ll always listen.”

She pauses, and he cracks one eye open. Her face is still sadistically tender from where she’s leaning across the center console to look up into his face as he hangs his head. 

It’s too much. She already knows, so you know what? Fuck it. “It’s wrong, Nancy.” Mike hates the way his voice cracks. “I’m wrong.” 

“Hey, hey, hey.” She grabs him properly by the upper arm and gives him a little shake. “There is a lot of bullshit happening in Hawkins right now, but you” —she shakes him again—“are not part of that. Of all the things to be scared of, why are you choosing love?”

He can’t hold in the sob this time. Nancy immediately draws him into a violent hug, awkward with their parallel seats and the console digging into their sides. It’s something that they never did as kids, but it makes Mike feel like he’s twelve years old again, reminds him of the first time he lost Will, to a real-life monster and not his own monstrous feelings. He wishes he wasn’t taller than her, so he could be fully cocooned in the older sister’s embrace he needed then. Let her be bigger and older and wiser and able to protect him from all his problems. But now he’s as old as she was when the devil first came to Hawkins. 

He cries for the child he was, he cries for the child he still is, and he cries for the child she was when she was forced to grow up too quickly. Nancy has always been like another adult to him; since the beginning of this fight with the Upside Down, she and her older friends were like the Party’s parents. 

He cries for the fact that his real parents would never hug him like this or say they love him if they knew. Dad always sneers at the television when they talk about the Stonewall Riots, twists the dial on the radio when Smalltown Boy comes on, calls gay men “it” when he’s forced to spit out a sentence about one. Mom is more passive, but if having a queer for a son so much as got her a funny look from the other ladies at a Tupperware party she would doubtlessly kick him to the curb. 

He cries for the fact that someone knows, and holds him through it all. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he stutters into the shoulder of Nancy’s sweater that’s getting soaked through with tears and snot and sin. 

Her hand rubs hesitantly up and down his spine. They aren’t used to this, the Wheelers. “Mike,” she whispers into his hair. “What on Earth do you have to be sorry for?”

A lot, he thinks, in the loud judgemental voice that’s always hammered through his head at every misstep, the one that sounds a lot like Ted Wheeler.

But there’s another little voice now, too, one that’s softer and kinder and sounds like the sister that’s scared to say she loves him but said it anyway when he needed it most, that pipes up to whisper, Nothing at all. 

***

Mike is in love with Will, and Nancy knows, and the world doesn’t end.

At least, no more than it already was. 

He still thinks that something’s off with him, but he’s shifting away from wrong. He’s starting to accept that maybe this is the way he’s always been, and the way he always will be, even if a part of him still wants to change it.

Most of all, he just feels alone. 

He can’t talk to Will, for obvious reasons. El, for others. Lucas and Dustin don’t have any experience with this kind of thing, and they’re too involved with both parties at stake in this dilemma. He’s talked to Nancy more than they have for pretty much their entire lives before this, and he doesn’t want to feel like he’s asking too much of her. Even if his parents weren’t so utterly dysfunctional at the moment, they’d be an obvious no-go, too.

Which is all to say, bottling it all up makes Mike feel like a shaken can of Coke ready to blow at the slightest pressure. And when a lot of pressure is exerted in the form of one-on-one time with Robin Buckley, well. 

Mike is kind of fucked.

“—so long story short, folks, when the military men (and women! We love women! Girl power!) say to stay away from the Big Mac’s fences, they mean it, because it really is shocking to try to climb one and find that, oops, somehow they became sparkier than a rom-com on the Fourth of July. All involved in the incident got away with burnt hands and even burnt-er egos, but our lovely armed crossing guards would rather not have to arrest the entire Hawkins High basketball team for anything other than murdering their opponents on the court at the championship game next week. Go, Tigers, just not to jail! You’re listening to WSQK, the Squawk! [silence]. Psst, don’t chicken out no—[weak rubber chicken squawks]”

As Robin drops the needle on the next song, Mike drops his head into his hands. “I’m so shit at this.”

“Nah, you just have to get the hang of it. If Steve Harrington can make a career out of it, a Walk ‘Em Down Wheeler can hack foley art.”

Mike glowers at the cassette deck. It’s been a week since his conversation with Nancy, and when she asked him to accompany her to the Squawk, he’d thought it was a front for another mortifying car chat; she still hasn’t demanded details (or even a real admission in non-veiled terms) about anything, and Mike had thought it was inevitable. But turns out, even after sharing the biggest secret of his life with her, she still has no gripes about using him as a means to an end. 

Because they’d pulled up to the station and she had all but dragged him to the door of the recording booth. “I need Steve,” she’d said flatly, which had made him perk up like a dog who’d heard the word “walk.” 

“That’s great, but I need Steve, too,” Robin had replied as records spun behind her and the On Air sign glowed red above the door.

Nancy had gestured to Mike, then, to his utter bewilderment. “I’ll trade you.”

Mike has fumbled his way through the past twenty minutes fueled by pure spite. For Robin, of course, for her relationship with Will (no matter what anyone says, Mike is firm in this belief), and for Nancy, for throwing him into what is essentially another closet with her.

Robin spins in aimless circles in her office chair with her head tilted up towards the ceiling. “You can’t just scare it into submission, you know.”

“What am I supposed to do, then? Chat it up?” he deadpans. “What does Steve usually do?”

“Woah, woah, woah.” Robin stops spinning. “Steve’s cassettes are not his romantic prospects. Steve’s cassettes are his children. His babies. You better respect them, they’re your…” Her eyes flick towards the ceiling, thinking. “The children of the president of your sister’s fan club. What do you call that?”

“Overly convoluted?” he mutters to himself.

Robin frowns. “I was going to say siblings, given that Steve is kind of the mother figure for the people. His nesting instincts are strong.”

Mike snorts and shakes his head. He can’t do this. He can’t do this. He can’t even look at Robin without bringing his blood to a boil, and being stuck in this tiny booth with her is keeping it at a steady simmer. What does Will see in her that he doesn’t see in Mike?

A girl, he supposes. 

Robin frowns at his silence and spins towards the crates of records, walking her fingers along the tops of the sleeves. “Have any song requests that would cheer you up?”

“What are you talking about?” he snarks. “I’m fine.”

“I have done four hundred and ninety-seven broadcasts, and never once have I seen someone be so personally offended by a cassette deck. What’s up?”

“Nothing!” He slumps low in his chair and crosses his arms protectively over his chest. “But can you play The Smiths?”

“The Smiths are gonna cheer you up?” she asks incredulously. “What, do you want me to queue up Total Eclipse of the Heart after that?”

“Fine, forget I said anything,” Mike mumbles. 

She shakes her head. “The Smiths,” she mutters, pulling the next song from the bin and sliding it free of its sleeve. “As you wish, I guess.”

As the last song ends, Morrissey starts to croon The Boy with the Thorn In His Side. “The boy with the thorn in his side / Behind the hatred, there lies / A murderous desire / For love.”

Robin spins her chair back to face him and gestures towards the record as though to say, Happy?

Mike just looks away and picks at a thread in the hem of his sweater. And it really is his sweater this time, since he’s been making a conscious effort to stop wearing Will’s clothes since realizing what the connotations might be,

“Look.” He hears cheap wheels on the concrete floor before Robin rolls into his periphery. She leans in and tilts her head to look into his eyes. “I don’t know if I, like, did something—which I probably did!—but you’ve gotta tell me. I’ve never been good at, like, social cues? My mom is still always saying I’ve got to get on that. So if I did something and now you’re harbouring some secret loathing for me because of it, please just let me know, because I promise you I didn’t mean to piss you off.”

“You didn’t do anything to piss me off.” Mike averts his eyes awkwardly. Robin is so… genuine that looking at her too long can feel like staring into the sun. “Nothing that’s your fault.”

“So what did I do that… isn’t my fault?”

“Nothing!” 

“Hmm.” She straightens and leans against the back of her chair. It tips back on its rear two wheels before she lets it slam back down. “You know, I dealt with this exact same sort of thing with Nancy. But that was because she thought I was dating Steve—which you know I’m not, because a) Steve, and b) there is no way I am getting myself involved in whatever weird little love triangle your sister is in with her two chimpanzees. And since I’m not dating anyone you would know—”

“Oh yeah?” Mike challenges, unable to stop himself. Shut up, Mike, this is how Nancy figured it out. But Mike has never been good at stopping his words once they’re on their way out. “I know you’re dating Will, so you can stop lying to me, okay? I’m his best friend, I know when something’s up with him. It’s just—don’t you think he’s a little on the young side? I get that we’re all, like, trauma bonded, or whatever, I just think it’s weird that an actual adult would be interested in a high school junior. Just—be good to him, okay? Because if you’re not I will come for you, or anyone who goes after my—friend. Friends.”

Robin’s jaw is hinged open wide enough that Mike could probably count her molars, and her eye actually twitches. “Me and—what?”

“You and Will,” he spits again.

She sits in stunned silence for another few seconds, and Mike kind of wonders if she’s going to hit him for his audacity or something. But she just cracks up, then fully breaks down cackling like a maniac while he just sits there, fuming.

“Me and Will!” she howls. “Oh man, good one. No, Michael, I’m not dating Will Byers. He is an actual child. And, again, not my type.” She’s still grinning and shaking her head in disbelief as she wipes tears from her eyes. 

“If you’re not—dating,” Mike tries, desperately trying to contain the hope that’s filling his chest like a helium balloon wedged between his ribs, “then why do you hang out with him so much?”

She raises an incredulous eyebrow at him. “I literally only talk to him during crawls. And don’t you, like, live with him? I’m not coming for your man, Mike, don’t worry.”

“He’s not my man!” he snaps quickly. “We’re friends! We’re friends.”

Robin’s face falls. “My bad, then,” she mutters, annoyed. “I didn’t realize you were one of those.” 

“One of what?” Mike does his best not to sound panicked. This is around the point where Nancy figured him out, so he needs to knock Robin off track. 

She looks over her shoulder at him from where she’s returned to her microphone to prepare the next track. “I wasn’t coming for your masculinity or insinuating anything. Didn’t think you’d take that as a personal attack.”

“Personal—I didn’t take it personally!”

She shakes her head and says a quick, deceptively chipper message into the mic as she makes good on her joke from earlier and starts to play Total Eclipse of the Heart. Once she flicks the mic off again, she spins back around with her arms crossed. “It’s fine, Mike. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter!” He opens his mouth to respond, stalls for a second, and then bluntly states, “I’m not—homophobic, or anything.”

“Spoken like a true ally,” she quips. “It doesn’t matter. I remember the Reagan sign on your lawn, I should have known you wouldn’t find it funny. But you know, social cues.”

It’s Mike’s turn to be left slack-jawed and indignant. “That’s who my parents voted for, and you couldn’t pay me to agree with them. I love g—those people. I almost got Bowie’s mohawk before freshman year. It’s just that I’m not—like that. That’s a… that’s a…that’s a…that’s…”

“That’s a sin?” Robin fills in.

“What? No!” 

“Uh huh.”

“Look, I’m not but—why do you care so much?”

Robin blinks, shakes her head, and looks away. “I told you, it doesn’t matter. This has been blown way out of proportion.”

Mike nods. “I—yeah. Yeah, it has. We can—drop it.”

Robin nods awkwardly. “Cool. Cool! It really doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I pissed you off.”

“You didn’t piss me off! I mean, not initially, but hurling accusations at me like that kind of did—”

“Why do you care so much?” she interrupts. “If you’re such an ally, why go on such a defensive?”

Shit. Shit. Not again. Mike knows Will called him the Heart, but he really needs to stop wearing it on his sleeve. “I don’t care! I just needed you to know that I’m not with Will like that, but I’m also not against it.” 

A sound like a dropped call buzzes through his head, and he realizes what he just said. “I mean, not against the principle of it, but I’m against it for myself because I’m not… I’m not…”

Robin blinks at him. “Oh.”

He shakes his head frantically at her. “Don’t say oh like that. Don’t say oh like you know something, because there’s nothing to know—”

“Mike,” Robin breathes, grabbing his knee to shut him up. “I’m not dating Will because I’m dating Vickie Dunne.”

Whatever argument he was about to make dissolves on his tongue. “Vickie—like, the nurse Vickie Dunne? Or is that short for, like, Victor, or something—?”

“The nurse Vickie Dunne,” Robin confirms. She lets her hand fall from his knee as she reaches into her back pocket. She pulls her wallet free, and withdraws a photograph that’s worn like it’s been in there for a while. She hands it over, and Mike takes it in his trembling hand.

It’s Robin and Vickie, arms around each other and heads tilted inwards, grinning and free. They’re here, at the Squawk, in the field behind the station; Mike can tell based on the radio tower spearing up behind them. 

He has approximately eight billion questions clamouring to be asked, but for some reason the one that wins is, “Who took the picture?”

“Steve,” she answers.

So that’s why they aren’t dating, and why Steve is still hung up on Nancy instead of going for the girl he’s been attached at the hip with since two summers ago. Dustin’s been griping about it since he got back from Camp Know Where, complaining that he won’t move on when the perfect next step is right in front of him. 

Mike stares mutely at the photo for another moment or two. “How did you… know?” 

He realizes that this was the question he’s been wanting to ask all along. Not How did you know you were in love with Jonathan? To Nancy or What’s the difference? to Robin or Have you ever been in love? to Will (although he would still like a few more answers to that one); he wanted to ask someone different, someone like him, how they knew what they were and how they came to accept it and how they found others like them to share the burden with.

She smiles at the ceiling and shakes her head. “I think I always knew, on some level, but I hid from it until freshman year of high school. Do you…” she sighs. “Do you remember Tammy Thompson?”

“The singer? The one who kind of sounds like a Wookiee?”

“She does not sound like a Wookiee!” Robin giggles. “I’ve heard Muppet, though.”

Mike chokes back a laugh, but when he sees the way Robin is smiling, he lets it loose. They devolve into howls of laughter and almost miss the end of the song, and Robin clatters over to the microphone as she tries to piece together some semblance of sanity. 

“Helloooo, Squawkins, Indiana! You’re talking to Rockin’ Robin, your favourite radio host to grace your airwaves (and if I’m not, don’t tell me). Now, not to get all sappy on you guys, but I’ve just had something funny happen to me, so I have a little quest for you. I want you to think of someone in your life that you don’t like—you can hate them, you can find them annoying, you can want to paint their name up on the theatre marquee and make them the town’s public enemy number one. Got it? Good. And now I want you to think about why you feel that way. Got that too?”

She glances over at Mike and smiles, which he returns tentatively.

“Now I want you to hold onto that, and next time you see them, I want you to just talk to them. Because, odds are, the reason you guys hate each other so much is because you’re more similar than you think. We’re harder on no one more so than ourselves, so just keep that in mind.

“[Clears throat] Thanks for bearing with me, Squawkers. Back to our scheduled programming, this next one goes out to old conflicts, new friends, and the people that’ve been both. This is WSQK, the Squawk! [rubber chicken squawks]”

Mike is already grinning when Robin flicks the mic off and raises her hands in celebration. “You got the squawk right!”

“I got the squawk right!” he hollers back. He meets the double hi-five she’s offering him and falls into another laughing fit.

Robin leashes in her chuckles to smile at him softly. “Anyway, enough about me. How did you know?”

That shuts him up real fast. He hesitates, then gestures in the direction of the microphone. “I guess… I kind of… hated you? For a while? And I didn’t know why. I thought I was just being overprotective of Will, because I’ve always been that way. But maybe the reason I’ve always been that way is because I’ve always been… this way.”

She shakes her head and leans her elbows on her knees. “You’d have every right to hate me for dating Will no matter what, because that would be really weird. I’m nineteen, and he’s, what, twelve?”

“Sixteen?” Mike laughs incredulously. 

She waves a hand in dismissal. “Same difference. Point is, you don’t have to chalk every feeling you’ve ever felt towards someone up to liking them like that. Remember the other day, when you asked me what the difference was between platonic love and something more?”

He nods. 

“And remember how I said that romantic love is, like, an add on?”

He nods again, skeptical. 

She ploughs on. “When you love someone as more than a friend, you still have to love them as a friend, too. You still have to like spending time with them even when you’re not making out, and you still have to care about what they have to say, and you still have to trust them with your life and be trustworthy with theirs. You need that foundation of friendship before you start building higher, but that also doesn’t negate the fact that you are, first and foremost, best friends.” She considers for a moment. “It’s also good to have other friendships too, though, because it’s not healthy for you or fair for the other person to hinge your entire existence on them. You have such a close-knit found family, Mike, so you have nothing to be scared of if you want one of them to be something more.”

Mike scrunches up his nose and looks away. “See, that’s what I thought with Eleven, and look how that’s turned out.”

“Oh, shit, I forgot you were dating that bald chick.” She pauses. “How… how is that turning out?”

He shakes his head. “That’s why I was talking to you last week. Thanks, by the way, because it was you that managed to convince me that I don’t want to be more than a friend with El.”

She furrows her brow. “Wait, that wasn’t about Will? When did you—”

“That night,” he says quickly, because while he knows they’re not on air, they’re a button press away from broadcasting this entire conversation on live radio, so he’d really rather maintain a little plausible deniability. “I went home that night and I was still thinking about it, and that’s when things started to go downhill.” 

He’d tried to end the sentence sounding sarcastic, but Robin frowns. “It’s not downhill if it’s who you are, Mike.”

He shrugs. “Doesn’t make it any less wrong.”

“Hey, watch who you’re talking to,” Robin cuts in, the threat undercut by the complete and utter tenderness in the way she says it. “It does, actually. Look.” She searches the booth for some sort of inspiration. “You love Will, right?”

He makes a face that’s something between utter panic and a sneer.

She rolls her eyes. “You can love someone without being in love with them, kid, we’ve been over this.”

He nods in agreement, and then in confirmation.

“Right,” she continues. “And you think he can do no wrong and want to protect him at all costs, right?”

He nods, slower.

She sits back in her chair. “Right. We like Will. We love Will. Will’s the best. Will deserves the world.”

Mike is barely nodding now, but he’s listening, which seems to be enough. 

She leans in again and grabs him by the biceps. “Okay, so if Will is so perfect, how could loving him be anything but?”

He opens his mouth to argue, but he can’t. 

Loathe as he is to admit it, she has a point. If Will is sunshine and paint smears and breathy laughs and swingsets with chipped paint, why is Mike so convinced that holding space for him in his heart will turn it necrotic? Why does he feel like Hawkins with rifts slashed through it if Will is part of the force that’s going to seal them shut? He was so focused on convincing himself that he’s slimy and wrong for loving a boy that he forgot that the boy is Will Byers, and associating him with either of those adjectives is more wrong than any feeling could ever be. 

So instead of arguing, he just closes his mouth and his eyes and buries his head in his hands, because he doesn’t know if he can fight this any longer if he can’t convince himself it’s bad. He’s Mike Wheeler, one of the good guys, paladin and Party member and protector of the world as he knows it, so why is he wasting his energy fighting back against something as simple as caring for his best friend?

There is a lot of bullshit happening in Hawkins right now, Nancy’s voice murmurs in his head. Of all the things to be scared of, why are you choosing love?

He might have cried in front of Nancy, but that was a special case of some sort of repressed sibling bond coming to the fore when he needed it most. He’d really rather not cry in front of Robin, who he simultaneously barely knows and feels closer with than he has with anyone else before. 

Well, maybe besides Will, but that’s another special case.

So instead he sucks in a massive breath and throws himself back in his office chair to stare at the ceiling and air out the eyes that are starting to sweat tears like it’s an early September night in Hawkins and they want to go sleep with Will in the basement.

Man, he’s been so obvious. But he’s also been so happy. How could he ever think that he was doing it all wrong?

The whole conversation has been soundtracked by Queen’s Crazy Little Thing Called Love, but the song is coming to an end, and Robin is rolling back over to the record player. “Want some more Smiths to lighten the mood?”

“God, no,” Mike scoffs. “Who gets happier when The Smiths are playing? Can you put on Bowie?”

She grins. “Excellent choice.”

And as Modern Love belts out across Hawkins, Mike really feels like he might have made a few. 

***

Mike is probably the least moody he’s been since… ever when Nancy picks him up an hour later. He’s still beaming ear to ear as he slides into the passenger seat and nudges the dial towards 94.5 FM to catch the end of Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Anyone listening closely to the Squawk for the past hour might have noticed that every song choice was either openly or implied to be queer, but who really was, and who knew Mike was even in the studio besides the two people that would understand?

“You look happy,” Nancy muses as she pulls back down the gravel drive.

Mike shrugs. “I had fun. I think I have a real career in foley art ahead of me.”

“Uh huh.” But she doesn’t sound judgemental, she just sounds proud.

Mike glances over at her. “What did you ‘need Steve’ for?” he asks, putting finger quotes around the words. 

She scoffs. “I didn’t need Steve, Mike, no matter how much he wants me to. I think the real question is, did you need Robin?”

Mike looks back out his window, at the trees flying by and the sunset behind them that’s twice as colourful as he thinks it’s ever been. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I did.”

***

Mike is in love with Will, and Nancy knows, and Robin knows, and everything is exactly the way it’s always been. 

The past two weeks have been an absolute whirlwind of a crawl gone awry and twelve kids gone missing and Vecna’s return to Hawkins, and somehow, through it all, Mike has managed to find himself. He broke up with El the next time he saw her after his talk with Robin, on the roof of the Squawk before another crawl while they talked about happily ever afters, and he told her the truth. The whole, nerve-wracking truth, about how he loves her (but isn’t in love with her) and how he loves her brother, too.

She hadn’t just taken it well, she’d actually initiated the breakup; she said that Mike wanted nothing more than to protect her, but she wanted nothing more to be free. She’d been shackled by powerful men her entire time in Hawkins Lab, and the second she’d crawled free of their grasp she’d fallen into the arms of another boy who, well meaning as he’d always been, was just as much of a cage. It had stung, of course, but Mike couldn’t dispute it; he knows he can be overprotective and is only happy when he’s needed, and El doesn’t need anyone but herself right now as she learns, really learns, what it means to fight for herself. Mike has always been the number one supporter of the fact that she’s not a tool, but he’d never realized that trying to keep her out of trouble was just as objectifying and controlling as the others planning for battle like she was a weapon to be deployed instead of a soldier wielding one.

So she’d said her piece, and he’d said his, and they’d hugged as friends and nothing more. “I still love you, El,” he’d murmured into her hair. “I’m sorry I never said it before. But I was trying to say it the wrong way, and friends don’t lie, and I was just so confused about why it felt like I was. But you’re my friend, and you always will be, and that’s how I’ll always love you.”

“It’s okay,” she’d murmured back. “I still love you as a friend, too.” A pause. “I think I loved you as more than that, too, but I did not know enough about the difference to be ready for it.”

He’d nodded. “I’m sorry I used you as my… my shield. I was always saying the others were using you as a weapon, but it turns out I might have been using you even more egregiously. Ironic, huh?”

She’d pulled back and braced her hands on his shoulders. “We all do things we are not proud of when we’re scared, Mike. All that matters is that we fix those mistakes when we are brave enough.”

Mike’s not feeling especially brave right now, though, as he tosses his bike on the grass outside the WSQK station two weeks later. Ever since Will unlocked his superpowers (and made direct eye contact with him while he’d wiped the blood from his nose), Mike has kind of been in a constant state of gay panic. He’s really glad he did most of his figuring himself out before that little incident at the Mac-Z, because if he’d still been trying to repress himself when he watched Will snap three Demogorgons Vecna-style to save his life, he probably would have exploded more violently than that pipe in the barracks bathroom.

Speaking of explosions, his face still feels oddly raw after chemistry class three hours ago. He and Will had been doing a lab, and Mike had tried to be a little flirtatious in his awkward impotent way (because of course he could execute heists under the military’s nose, but the mole on Will’s lip was enough to make him crumble), but Will must have really not been into it, because he’d turned around and blown up a beaker in Mike’s face. He’d never taken Will as someone to physically lash out (and he’s still not entirely convinced that that’s what it was), but he’s seen El use her powers to do something similar, so maybe it’s just a Superman thing that his Lois Lane self doesn’t get.

In any case, he needs to talk to Robin about it, because this is what he does now, and he’s never understood better why “gay” is a synonym for “happy.” Even if this thing with Will never goes anywhere, it’s kind of fun to be in love, and it’s even more fun when it feels like an inside joke and he has someone to share it with.

Even if it still makes his heart squeeze like a fist if he thinks about it too long, and he can’t breathe a word about it to anyone else for fear of actual prosecution. Baby steps. 

He’d had the Squawk playing from the radio mounted to the front of his bike, so he knows Robin’s in the middle of a song and her microphone won’t be on to broadcast something overly incriminating across the whole of Hawkins. When he flings the door open he’s already calling out “Robin! Robin, I think I should just hand myself over to Vecna because there is no way he—”

But he stops dead. Because Robin and Steve aren’t alone, and yeah, she’s in the middle of a song, but that doesn’t mean there’s no one there to hear something they shouldn’t.

And also, they’re all singing the words to Jessie’s Girl really wrong.